The Campaign to Impeach George W. Bush
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Eden Watch
Drought Watch
Hurricane watch for the End of May
IMF and World Bank get anthrax - who gets blamed?
Drought report - near Dustbowl conditions in the praries also First Dust storm of the year blankets prarie city and wildfires burn
In other livestock news, Japan is dealing with an outbreak of mad cow disease, having just discovered their fourth mad cow, and this in spite of apparently having in place a stringent mad cow policy, which includes wide spread testing. Beef consumption in Japan has dropped by a quarter since the last mad cow scare in Japan, which prompted the stricter policies now in place. If a country with strict mad cow policies could still be struggling to manage the disease, this leaves one to wonder about the situation in the United States, a country which, for reasons of politics and the powerful influence of special interests groups, has no mad cow policy in place at all. Attempt have been made to downplay the importance of the mad deer of Wisconsin by pointing out that Mad cow disease is not communicable, and that cows cannot therefore catch mad cow disease from Wisconsin's mad deer. However, it seems quite possible that the deer of Wisconsin got their version of the disease by browsing on cattle feed. In another livestock related story, South Korea is killing another 40,000 pigs infected with Hoof and Mouth disease, after killing tens of thousands of other pigs in recent weeks. So far, it seems the disease has not spread to other livestock, but the South Korean government is monitoring the situation. South Korea pork exports were hit hard by the disease, being banned globally, and having just resumed the new outbreak of the disease, which has also been plaguing Europe, in particular Britain in recent years, South Korea now finds its pork export business going down the tank once again.
Warren Buffet predicts a nuclear attack on the U.S.A.
On fear and honor in the Middle East conflict - a psycholigist analyzes the Mid_East conflict. Also from the same site : Psychologists on the psychology of suicide bombings April 2002
A blood Red sign - May 1st, 2002
Suicide watch over America
The strange mad cow policy in the U.S.A.
The Spin of the day site recently featureed these mad cow stories... MAD COW USA? YOUNG CJD DEATHS SEEM ON THE RISE - " Two young Michigan men have died from a mad cow-type disease called "sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD)." The men did not die of actual British mad cow disease, called new variant CJD or vCJD in humans. No one knows what caused their sporadic CJD, but the odds of two young men dying at the same time in the same hospital are astronomical. The human victims of British mad cow disease are also typically young. The Michigan deaths raise many sobering questions: Could their TSE infections (transmissible spongiform encephalopathy) have resulted from eating US venison, pork, sheep or beef? Did they consume nutritional supplements made from animal glandular tissue? Do their deaths, along with others including young hunters Doug McEwen, Jay Whitlock and Kevin Boss, indicate that a strain or strains of TSE from US deer, elk, or livestock are now infecting humans? Only time and research will tell, but unfortunately the US government refuses to provide sufficient research funding, refuses to adequately test livestock for TSE agents, refuses to ban the feeding of slaughterhouse waste to livestock, and will not require mandatory reporting of CJD cases." Federal Researcher Won't Eat Wisconsin's 'Mad Deer' - "The outbreak of what has been dubbed 'mad deer disease' in Wisconsin is gathering national media attention from Business Week, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. Most articles downplay human health risks. Given the long invisible latency of such diseases in humans, it might not be proven for decades whether or not people can die from handling or eating infected deer. Dr. Byron Caughey, a government National Institutes of Health researcher who is an expert in the field of mad cow-type diseases, says that he would not eat venison from the area of Wisconsin where chronic wasting disease, CWD, has been discovered. Says Caughey, "The risk may be small but it's not a risk I'd want to take." A recent study showed that the British human death toll from mad cow disease is doubling every three years and now exceeds 100. The eventual toll is predicted to go as high as 100,000 dead in the decades ahead, but no one knows for sure."
A 'pale horse' stalks Southern Africa ... BBC Real Media : U.N. warns of upcoming mass starvation in Southern Africa ... Also Famine threatens almost half of Zimbabwe with an "estimated 7.8 million of the country's 13 million population in need of urgent food aid. The food shortages are mirrored in Malawi and Mozambique, where poor harvests and erratic rains have led to famine." U.N. issues appeal for Southern africa The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has launched an appeal for millions of people across southern Africa who it says are in desperate need of food aid.
While the recent scandal of abusive priests in the United States is in the headlines, a survey of a pattern of abusive priests and cover ups indicates that the issues to be dealt with here and that this sort of abuse is not an isolated incident or problem with a 'few bad apples' but rather are systemic to the institution and are a Global problem, with incidents spanning many decades
U.S. judge plans to outlaw federal death : (Reuters) -- A U.S. judge Thursday said he is prepared to rule the federal death penalty unconstitutional ... Judge Jed Rakoff of the Manhattan federal court gave U.S. Justice Department lawyers until May 15 to argue whether retaining capital punishment as a means of deterrence and retribution "can constitutionally justify" the knowing execution of innocent people ... "We now know, in a way almost unthinkable even a decade ago, that our system of criminal justice, for all its protections, is sufficiently fallible that innocent people are convicted of capital crimes with some frequency," wrote Rakoff ... He said the "state-sponsored death of a meaningful number of innocent people" could deprive those people of due process ... The modern death penalty has had its chance over the last 25 years and has produced repeated death sentences for innocent citizens ... There have been 770 U.S. death sentences carried out since (1976), according to the Death Penalty Information Center, and McNally said 100 innocent people have been freed from death row over that time ... The governor (of Illinois) in 2000 suspended executions after several death-row inmates were found to be innocent.
Nigerian 419 scam email ... also on the BBC site : Nigeria cracks down on email scam
Cardinal Law receives standing ovation for abuse apology
BBC : Drought fears in America - It's back to the old ways at the Matterhorn Nursery in the village of Spring Valley. The young plants can only be watered by hand, and then less often - and using less water - than usual. The sophisticated automatic irrigation has been shut down ... if it didn't have its own well, it would be out of business by now. There are few customers anyway ... "We're really just beginning to see the effects now." And the car wash in the nearby town of Goshen would have been shut down too, if it also didn't have a well to fall back on ... The reservoir is a sorry dried-up sight. And deep down the ground is dry ... This reservoir is at crisis level, 112 inches (2.85m) down on what it should be, with only enough water for another 50 days. And it is a situation repeated along America's eastern seaboard, all the way from Maine to Georgia, with severe drought warnings in force ... It is time for Americans to live within their means, says water consultant Jim Ullrich. "We have to change what we do in, pardon the pun, flush years and conserve our stocks, husband our water resources better," he says. ... Americans are the heaviest water users in the world. Some of them use four times as much as Europeans, their closest rivals. So they may have to save gallons rather than glasses if they want to avoid living with drought.
UN envoy says "Jenin camp 'horrific beyond belief'" "A UN envoy has said that the devastation left by Israeli forces in the Jenin refugee camp is "horrific beyond belief". Terje Roed-Larsen, who toured the West Bank refugee camp on Thursday, said it was "morally repugnant" that Israel had not allowed rescue teams in after the fighting ... An independent forensic expert says evidence suggests that a massacre has taken place. "It is totally destroyed, it looks like an earthquake has hit it," he said ... the stench of death is horrible ... "We have expert people here who have been in war zones and earthquakes and they say they have never seen anything like it," he added."
In a strange twist on the 'war on terrorism' a Spanish judge seeks Kissinger in terrorism investigation ... The Spanish judge is focusing on decades of state terrorism practiced by politicians, with a focus on Latin America. "The Spanish judge, Balthazar Garzon, has asked Interpol for information about a scheduled visit to London by the former US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, next week. Mr Kissinger is a new target for the man known in Spain as Super Judge, as he continues his personal crusade against what he describes as international terrorism. Specifically, Judge Garzon wants to investigate what Mr Kissinger and the US Government knew about a plot in the 1970s, known as Operation Condor. In this operation six former Latin American dictatorships - Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay - agreed to assassinate each other's political opponents."
More drought relief comes to Iran, allegedly one of the world's three most evil nations. Cloud cover over Iran on April 17, 2002. More rain in the forecast for Iran in the coming days. Perhaps the wetlands will recover after the years of drought.
Typical radar rain image over North America for the same time period (next to nothing this week).
See the Drought page above. This developing drought situation is truly unnerving, since, you know, I do live on this continent as well.
Palestinians children's artwork on the badil.org site
for Palestinian refugee rights
I don't know if anyone else noticed the same thing, but the new 'Bin Laden video' looks fishy, just one more fishy video in a string of fishy confessions and videos. If you look at Bin Laden, in particular his white head dress, you will notice a blue outline around the head dress, and this type of blue outlining is the kind of artifact which can happen when a person is 'cut and pasted' using software. The picture below is a jpeg. The blue outline is quite noticeable on the live video footage...
Canada's VisionTv critiques media coverage of 911 - this page on the Hamilton IndyMedia site summarizes the coverage of Barrie Zwicker, and provides links to transcipts of the episodes which has generated more email and phone calls than anything else ever broadcast on the Vision channel.
UN Rights Body Condemns Israel for "Mass Killings" GENEVA -- The United Nations top human rights body condemned Israel on Monday for "mass killings" of Palestinians and demanded that it end its military offensive in the occupied territories. The annual session of the Geneva-based Commission on Human Rights approved a resolution sponsored mainly by Arab and Muslim states that also blasted Israel for "gross violations" of humanitarian law and affirmed the "legitimate right of Palestinian people to resist", Reuters reported. The commission passed the motion by 40 votes to five, with seven states abstaining. A number of European Union countries voted in favor, but Britain and Germany voted against ... Note that the National Post, a Canadian newspaper on the right wing side of things, reported on the same story this morning with a banner headline stating that the U/N/ voted in favor of 'Palestinian violence'.
A collection of links to previous pages on this site dealing with Israel and the Palestinians
Who lives in Jenin refugee camp ... a statistical survey ... as densely packed and as poor as Jewish ghettos were throughout history, there is no way that missiles and machine gunfire from helicopter gunships into such a densely populated ghetto could not have resulted in high civilian casualties, which probably explains why the Israeli army wanted the bodies buried in mass graves and have kept international observors, the Red Cross and ambulances away from Jenin for weeks.
A story from the Jewish Independant Media site... Destruction of Palestinian Public Institutions since March 29th "This is a humanitarian crisis without precedent in its destructive impact on the Palestinian people and its institutions", Joint statement on the humanitarian crisis in the Occupied Territories, from United Nations organizations, including UNDP, UNFPA, World Health Organization, UN High Commission for Refugees, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent and UNWRA, among others. Rome, 10 April 2002 ...
The Independant reports on the destruction of Jenin ... Now that the Israeli surpreme court has ruled that the blackout and blockade of Jenin refugee camp be lifted reports are now coming out that Israeli "troops have caused devastation in the centre of the Jenin refugee camp, reached yesterday by The Independent, where thousands of people are still living amid the ruins. A residential area roughly 160,000 square yards about a third of a mile wide has been reduced to dust. Rubble has been shovelled by bulldozers into 30ft piles. The sweet and ghastly reek of rotting human bodies is everywhere ... the descriptions given by the many other refugees who escaped from Jenin camp were understated, not, as many feared and Israel encouraged us to believe, exaggerations ...Every wall is speckled and torn with bullet holes and shrapnel, testimony of the awesome, random firepower of Cobra and Apache helicopters that hovered over the camp. Building after building has been torn apart, their contents of cheap fake furnishings, mattresses, white plastic chairs spewed out into the road. Every other building bears the giant, charred, impact mark of a helicopter missile. Last night there were still many families and weeping children still living amid the ruins, cut off from the humanitarian aid. Ominously, we found no wounded ... Israel was still trying to conceal these scenes yesterday. It had refused entry to Red Cross ambulances for nearly a week, in violation of the Geneva Convention"
A statement by Jimmy Carter in August 2000 describing Israeli violations of peace agreements
The electronic intifada on Sharon
Are Palestinians Human? ... "There are many pointless deaths but never a needless suicide".
Christian and Jewish Right call for Biblical massacre of Palestinians
Reversing the Middle East Headlines - a satire
Red Heifer born in Israel
Israel delays U.N. mission to Jenin again. This time the mission has been put back to Sunday. Now we might remember when Iraq used to delay U.N. missions, so they could hide a few things before they got there, and this sort of thing just naturally makes a person suspicious. Sharon said he wants the U.N. team to examine the 'terrorist infrastructure' in that run down slum, and I suggest that they also investigate the 'terrorists infrastructure' in those illegal settlements in the occupied terroritories, and the history of terrorism practiced with impunity by the settlers for well over a decade. The settlements I might remind you are both a violation of international law, the Geneva convention, and U.N. resolutions, although, thank God, Israel will not have to worry about being bombed repeatedly for violating U.N. resolutions, and will just carry on gradually adding settlement onto settlement, creating 'facts on the ground' until its a done deed, while, of course, putting up with wave after wave of suicide bombers while they are doing it, and responding with wave after wave of missiles, attacks from helicopter gunships, tank bombardments, and other forms of blowing people up, such explosions, thank God, being legal and not a great wrongness, like suicide bombings, which are not proper bombings because they were done in Israel, which is always terrible, and as well, to make matters worse, they were not done properly by the proper authorities, the way that bombing people to death should be done, properly by flying over or driving over in a multimillion dollar tank, which is legal, and never seems to cause anyone a problem ...What a planet...Now if you slap a saint in the face, they might turn the other cheek, but human nature being what it is, its more than likely that you will get a punch in the face, but just try and tell anyone something like that and see how far you will get.
After the years of drought, Iran welcomes heavy rain and snow
Three solid days of heavy
rain and snow during mid April
Iran is buried under the clouds at
the far right of the picture
Iran and Eden both also recieved
rains during the Easter weekend
although the rain of the last three days
has been much heavier in Iran
TEHRAN TIMES CITY DESK
TEHRAN - Rain and snow have continued for the last three days in most parts of the country. Snow has covered the heights in Shahmirzad, Semnan Province and rain and snow has continued in most parts of the province, delighting farmers after the years of drought. After 3 days of heavy rain and snow temperatures in the province have decreased by 12 to 14 degrees centigrade.
Heavy rain in Shemiranat has slowed traffic on Shemiran's highways including the Hemat, Moddares, Chamran and Babaee highways. The continuous rain in Shemiran caused residents to reach their offices late.
In the meantime, it is reported that rain and snow in Mazandaran has damaged rice crops and trees. But, according to agricultural officials, the benefits of the recent rains in Mazandaran outweigh the losses. At the beginning of the Iranian New Year (March 21) temperatures rose sharply in Mazandaran and reached 31 degrees centigrade, but due to the recent rains temperatures have decreased by 10 to 17 degrees centigrade.
Also, snow has whitened the heights in northern parts of Khorasan Province. Snow has been followed by continuous rain for the last three days. The temperature in these areas is 6 degrees centigrade. Some of the farmers in northern towns of the province have performed thanksgiving prayers. Heavy rains in Isfahan Province have caused floods in some parts of the province causing some damage to farms and connecting roads.
Flooding in Kashan also caused some damage but the flooding has been containe d. Some 10 centimeters of snow has accumulated in some parts of the province.
April/May News page two
